Soren on politics

By Richie Ann Ashcraft

Soren is one of those kids who sits down and starts telling you things that only 80-year-old men know.

He's only six but in his head he's so, so much older. It's not uncommon for Soren to sit down with one of our friends and start up a conversation about World War II, of course, or science, or creationism.

This summer, he sat on my brother-in-law's patio in Washington, talking to the neighbor man about movies about Pearl Harbor and other war battles. He was kicked back in the chair holding a glass of milk while the guy was kicked back holding a beer. They were engaged in the conversation for quite some time. It made me laugh, and I thanked the guy for taking the time to talk to my kid and take him seriously. From that conversation, Soren decided we must Netflix "Tora! Tora! Tora!" the minute we got home. Wow, that movie is BORING.

He had some buddies over for a play date recently and I heard him telling them over a game of Foosball, "You know what's interesting? Greenland is actually covered in ice and Iceland is actually green. Weird huh?" I don't think his friends had any clue what Greenland or Iceland even were, much less care. They just wanted him to serve the ball already.

I'm proud Soren's mental gymnastics and I'm often looking for weird things to tell him to add fuel to his fire. The Greenland/Iceland thing, yeah, that was me. But, even knowing about his adult way of thinking, he never ceases to blow me away.

This weekend, he started talking about politics. It blew me away because what he said did not come out of anything he might of overheard at home. Politics is not something we talk a lot about in our house. Or at least I didn't think so. Of course, nobody, not even a six-year-old can get very far away from it in Colorado . The fact that he's a "freakin'" swing voter just cracked me up so I made him repeat himself for the camera.